About us

Aloha! Welcome to Otaku Ohana, a look at anime, manga and comic culture from the perspective of your tag team in fandom, Wilma Win and Jason S. Yadao. It’s the latest step in our evolution from writing anime and manga reviews for Drawn & Quartered, a column that used to run Sundays in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin; to Cel Shaded in the Star-Bulletin, perhaps the only column about anime and manga culture to run weekly in a major metropolitan daily newspaper, from 2005 to 2011; to this very blog, which started off as an online supplement to Cel Shaded in 2009, became the de facto replacement to it in 2011, and was hosted on the Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s website until the blogs were shut down in October 2016.

The blog’s name may need a bit of explanation to those of you not familiar with Hawaiian culture. “Otaku,” you’re probably already familiar with — if you’re reading this, you’re probably well-versed in anime and manga fan culture enough to know that it refers to fellow fans like you. But we’re also all friends here, right? Friends who know what words like “shonen,” “moe,” “yaoi” and “hentai” all mean without my having to define them every time I bring them up? (I’d probably need several columns to define the word “moe” in particular, and by the time that’s done, I’ll probably have forgotten what I meant to write about in the first place.)

Thus the other half of this blog’s name comes into play: “Ohana.” As Lilo in Disney’s “Lilo and Stitch” imprinted upon my mind several years ago (mostly because she and other characters said this line about a zillion times), “Ohana means family, and family means no one gets left behind.”

So join us as we talk about our fandoms and what brings us joy. It’s been a long, fun trip so far, and we thank you for continuing with us on our journey.